Are there software tools for analysing forum threads?

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Post Post #75 (ISO) » Fri Oct 09, 2020 3:38 pm

Post by Spirit of Mafia »

In post 73, the worst wrote:Well played - I wasn't dedicated enough to that joke.
Who are you calling a “joke”? I am deadly serious about being the spirit of mafia.
In post 74, Jake The Wolfie wrote:
In post 72, Spirit of Mafia wrote:
In post 20, the worst wrote:Image
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VOTE: the worst

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Post Post #76 (ISO) » Fri Oct 09, 2020 5:35 pm

Post by Ramcius »

It's not about general scum or town habits, people are too different and have too different playstyles. It's about personal habits - which is meta. People tend to use same words/phrases as one alignment, but not other, that's a given. Ofc that doesn't apply to everyone and you still need to find these towntells/scumtells during the game, but if you hit those that's it, it's either hard guilty or IC basically. Another thing is with people, who hate playing scum, they can be easily confirmed as town with meta software, it's pretty much trust tell, but you can't tell person that they shouldn't use certain words/phrases or to use these words/phrases as a scum. Currently towntells/scumtells aren't taken serious, because they are unreliable and no one is going to dig through someone's posting history to confirm it, but you guys really want to make them reliable and for what reason?
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Post Post #77 (ISO) » Fri Oct 09, 2020 10:41 pm

Post by the worst »

i get the impression you're talking about either:

1) using a tool which parses language/posting patterns and makes an effort to discern whether someone is aligned with the town or the mafia (which i agree, would be against the spirit of actually playing the game :P).

2) say, for a very rough instance, we're looking at a player who basically refuses to play and just prodges as scum. a tool which counts posts could discern that they are not posting, and a player analysing this information could discern that they are scum. i don't see how this type of situation is different from just having activity overview available, no.

3) getting spicy: counting, for example, how many different words people are using in a thread and producing a report on a quantitative report. this information could then be analysed to suggest whether the player's language is forced and stilted, and therefore whether they're lying. i'd argue that this process could be done manually, just with a considerable time investment, and that automating the 'data collection' part of it isn't actually unethical. the analysis & determination of alignment is still done by a player.

what do you think of this situation? - i'm curious to see if we hit an impasse, because i'm not sure if we disagree necessarily.




(obligatorily signing off: these are my views as a user, not something i am putting forth on behalf of site staff. i'm here to advance this convo, not to clarify any official stances!)
who's scum? i haven't read up yet but like, it's me
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Post Post #78 (ISO) » Fri Oct 09, 2020 11:09 pm

Post by Ramcius »

"Player X said "phrase" 3 times a scum, never as a town, so player X is scum for saying "phrase" here"

That was how Mulch got executed in Beneath the mask game, can you guess what alignment he flipped? We all have habits, we all say things as one alignment and not other, maybe we say something much more often as one alignment than other. It's just a matter of finding our tells by running uncommonly used words/phrases
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Post Post #79 (ISO) » Sat Oct 10, 2020 12:01 am

Post by the worst »

It's an interesting idea, parsing people's town & scum games for turns of phrase which occur to us when we're telling the truth or lying specifically. Players do this all the time with uh, mixed levels of success. I'm also not sure if I love the idea of over-reliance on meta from a sheer fun-ness perspective.

But is it unethical to have a computer parse large amounts of information, which a human could have just done in more time, so that the player can then analyse and take a guess? Tbh I have no idea. It seems to just save players massive amounts of time, so I'm not sure it adds a compromising factor to the experience necessarily. But it sounds less fun than just playing mafia at face value. But maybe this part of my argument pushes into the broader "is meta bad" argument.

This is a pretty wild rabbit hole. I'm glad it's a hypothetical discussion for now!


pedit: oh, and I just remembered when Nancy guiltied a player for continuously dismissing scumcases against them as a "witch-hunt". :lol: much the same as the Mulch elim I think.
who's scum? i haven't read up yet but like, it's me
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Post Post #80 (ISO) » Sat Oct 10, 2020 3:26 am

Post by Psyche »

In post 17, Cabd wrote:So, iirc Psyche has an API to do this specifically for MS. I've been debating ingesting it into a BI tool and doing some analytics.
oh it just collects and makes posts atm but it's a nice start i hope
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Post Post #81 (ISO) » Sat Oct 10, 2020 3:30 am

Post by Psyche »

I think the proper role of assistant tech in mafia is probably not during the game, but before and after, to help think through strategy, potential improvements to playstyle/meta, and so on. Simple tools like a vote tracker would be appropriate if they and their outputs were accessible to
everyone
, but I think private and even semi-private technologies that do tasks everyone not in-the-know can only do manually are pretty unfair.
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Post Post #82 (ISO) » Sat Oct 10, 2020 3:36 am

Post by Psyche »

We can think of other, simpler games and simple tools that might help someone do better in them without doing all the decision-making for them. A tool could tell someone the spots they've already checked while searching for people in a game of hide and seek, for instance. Or something could track choice outcomes in a series of rock-paper-scissors games between two people, maybe returning a few simple summary statistics. All these do stuff someone could maybe roughly do in their head, and don't guarantee wins going forward. But if only one relevant party had access to such tools, they'd put the other parties at a disadvantage. At minimum, they — like hydras! — would change the nature of the game in a way players should be warned about before signing up.

But say you studied past games of rock-paper-scissors and tracked outcomes over game series not connected to the one you're about to start. Maybe you learned that peope usually start with "Rock" in their first game. Imo that kind of knowledge assymetry just reflects a difference of skill and is fair to exploit.
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Post Post #83 (ISO) » Sat Oct 10, 2020 6:27 am

Post by Andycyca »

In post 61, yessiree wrote:
In post 20, the worst wrote:Image
i am the spirit of mafia
O great spirit of mafia, what is your wisdom?
I vote to refer to these posts and define them to be «The Spirit of Mafia» for all future discussions on this forum
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Post Post #84 (ISO) » Sat Oct 10, 2020 10:00 pm

Post by Spirit of Mafia »

In post 83, Andycyca wrote:
In post 61, yessiree wrote:
In post 20, the worst wrote:Image
i am the spirit of mafia
O great spirit of mafia, what is your wisdom?
I vote to refer to these posts and define them to be «The Spirit of Mafia» for all future discussions on this forum
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Post Post #85 (ISO) » Sat Oct 17, 2020 8:03 pm

Post by Gamma Emerald »

In post 78, Ramcius wrote:"Player X said "phrase" 3 times a scum, never as a town, so player X is scum for saying "phrase" here"

That was how Mulch got executed in Beneath the mask game, can you guess what alignment he flipped? We all have habits, we all say things as one alignment and not other, maybe we say something much more often as one alignment than other. It's just a matter of finding our tells by running uncommonly used words/phrases
Are you against this entire style or just the automation of it?
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Post Post #86 (ISO) » Sat Oct 17, 2020 8:42 pm

Post by Ramcius »

In post 85, Gamma Emerald wrote:
In post 78, Ramcius wrote:"Player X said "phrase" 3 times a scum, never as a town, so player X is scum for saying "phrase" here"

That was how Mulch got executed in Beneath the mask game, can you guess what alignment he flipped? We all have habits, we all say things as one alignment and not other, maybe we say something much more often as one alignment than other. It's just a matter of finding our tells by running uncommonly used words/phrases
Are you against this entire style or just the automation of it?
I'm against meta altogether tbf, but in current state it isn't that threatening. It's not really feasible without automation, so if anyone is crazy enough to try this manually, they can do it
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Post Post #87 (ISO) » Sat Oct 24, 2020 12:40 am

Post by tn5421 »

In post 32, Cabd wrote:
In post 25, Ramcius wrote:Equalizer of what?
Time.

I used to keep a literal metabinder of things that majorly differed between an individual's town games and mafia games, because I had the free time to read almost every game onsite.

Turns of phrase, post count, post density, post timing... there were a LOT of super-specific tells like that.


But now? I'm a father and I work full time and I don't have the time to do that. Automating part of that process, and then applying human logic to the patterns it detects? That could be incredibly useful.

And it'll march the arms race along further. But, you cannot stuff the genie back in the bottle. The working solution to countries obtaining nuclear weapons was never "That's unfair, you should stop doing that"; just as it was for the shotgun (Famously detested by the Germans during Trench Warfare) or the longbow, or the battering ram, or any other weapon in human history.
The answer is to democratize it in some way, such as by making it trivial for everyone to run.

In post 40, Ramcius wrote:
In post 38, Syryana wrote:
In post 35, Ramcius wrote:
In post 32, Cabd wrote:
In post 25, Ramcius wrote:Equalizer of what?
Time.

I used to keep a literal metabinder of things that majorly differed between an individual's town games and mafia games, because I had the free time to read almost every game onsite.

Turns of phrase, post count, post density, post timing... there were a LOT of super-specific tells like that.


But now? I'm a father and I work full time and I don't have the time to do that. Automating part of that process, and then applying human logic to the patterns it detects? That could be incredibly useful.

And it'll march the arms race along further. But, you cannot stuff the genie back in the bottle. The working solution to countries obtaining nuclear weapons was never "That's unfair, you should stop doing that"; just as it was for the shotgun (Famously detested by the Germans during Trench Warfare) or the longbow, or the battering ram, or any other weapon in human history.
You forgetting really important part of the mafia - balance. Improving town with software assistance isn't the answer you're looking for. You'll have to balance games somehow to make up for scum
You seem to be under the entirely mistaken impression that meta only helps town. Scum, armed with the same information, can easily use small differences in play to get miselims and cause other shenanigans.

The issue here isn't balance. The issue is how do these tools alter the mafia landscape and what quality of life improvements do they offer. Do people just use the tools to automatically win games? That's bad. It's also unlikely someone develops an AI sophisticated enough to do that. Automating things like vote counts and post history or meta? That's a convenience and I'm all for it.

Further, to Cabd's point, some of these tools already exist. They can benefit a small portion of players (i.e. the devs that made them) or they could be crowdsourced and available to all players if they choose to partake.
You don't need sophisticated AI, you simply need a tool to run all person's games looking for specific word/phrase and how often person said it as either alignment. Good luck fighting this meta with arguments like "meta isn't accurate/sucks" or "you can't use meta from 1 or few games", you can't even alter meta as a scum providing only examples that benefits your agenda - software will provide absolute meta. Like I can do some things and bust my ass covering my own scum meta, but I can't do shit, if townies will be confirmed as a town and I'm dead to PoE.


The software can only respond with what it knows. If you haven't painstakingly scanned every, say, Cabd game, the script may not have enough information to come to any meaningful conclusion.

I'm in favor of scripts that put the information in front of you and leave it to you to analyze it. I'm not in favor of scripts that do a lot of that analyzing for you.
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Post Post #88 (ISO) » Sat Oct 24, 2020 5:39 am

Post by Ramcius »

In post 87, tn5421 wrote: The software can only respond with what it knows. If you haven't painstakingly scanned every, say, Cabd game, the script may not have enough information to come to any meaningful conclusion.

I'm in favor of scripts that put the information in front of you and leave it to you to analyze it. I'm not in favor of scripts that do a lot of that analyzing for you.
What makes you think that you can't simply adjust script to require just minimal effort to scan all games of a person?
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Post Post #89 (ISO) » Sat Oct 24, 2020 5:41 am

Post by Ythan »

There's still a not trivial step between crawling up those posts and analysis. Without that it's just a better search function. And nobody thinks that would be bad.
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Post Post #90 (ISO) » Sat Oct 24, 2020 5:55 am

Post by Psyche »

I think that even relatively trivial scripts that make stuff like meta can be an unfair advantage in a lot of circumstances.
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Post Post #91 (ISO) » Sat Oct 24, 2020 5:59 am

Post by Ramcius »

In post 89, Ythan wrote:There's still a not trivial step between crawling up those posts and analysis. Without that it's just a better search function. And nobody thinks that would be bad.
See, Ythan, I don't like being called a nobody. That aside, most people have no real idea what they are talking, I mean, people, who post here, they have no real idea how that even might work or how it might look, so taking their opinion on what effect it might have on mafia is simply dumb.
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Post Post #92 (ISO) » Sat Oct 24, 2020 6:10 am

Post by Ythan »

In post 91, Ramcius wrote:
In post 89, Ythan wrote:There's still a not trivial step between crawling up those posts and analysis. Without that it's just a better search function. And nobody thinks that would be bad.
See, Ythan, I don't like being called a nobody. That aside, most people have no real idea what they are talking, I mean, people, who post here, they have no real idea how that even might work or how it might look, so taking their opinion on what effect it might have on mafia is simply dumb.
I feel the same way. On a related note how do you think it would work specifically?
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Post Post #93 (ISO) » Sat Oct 24, 2020 6:40 am

Post by Ramcius »

In post 92, Ythan wrote:
In post 91, Ramcius wrote:
In post 89, Ythan wrote:There's still a not trivial step between crawling up those posts and analysis. Without that it's just a better search function. And nobody thinks that would be bad.
See, Ythan, I don't like being called a nobody. That aside, most people have no real idea what they are talking, I mean, people, who post here, they have no real idea how that even might work or how it might look, so taking their opinion on what effect it might have on mafia is simply dumb.
I feel the same way. On a related note how do you think it would work specifically?
For starters, I'm well aware that it wouldn't work on every person, but still, if you can reliably determine few players alignment in a game, it's already massive, imagine clearing people and turning them basically into IC or having free guilty or couple out of the blue and scum team can't prevent that from happening. I don't even want to imagine resurgence of trust tells "I only say X as a town, you can check it for yourself". Let's be real, we all have speaking patterns, we talk a bit different as a different alignment and we don't even notice that, matter is just picking up of these patters
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Post Post #94 (ISO) » Sat Oct 24, 2020 6:45 am

Post by Ythan »

In post 93, Ramcius wrote:if you can reliably determine few players alignment in a game
How though how specifically is this going to play out.
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Post Post #95 (ISO) » Sat Oct 24, 2020 2:10 pm

Post by Cabd »

I hope you didn't mean me by "People who don't have any idea how this would work" because uh.... I already built the Alpha for the "word cloud" tool?
Spoiler: Alpha Screenshots
Here's a completed newbie game (40ish) pages. This currently has to manually scrape and load each post, but admittedly will be much faster once the API is available.

Here's the completed game thread:
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=84378

Here's what the tool sees when I load the first 200 posts (AKA 8 Pages), filtered by town posters and "repetitions" set to 5 or above:
Image

And for mafia with the same settings...

Image

Now... tell me what about this is at all somehow different than a player going through the first 8 pages while noting phrases they see?
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Post Post #96 (ISO) » Sat Oct 24, 2020 2:47 pm

Post by Gamma Emerald »

Who were the mafia in that game?
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Post Post #97 (ISO) » Sat Oct 24, 2020 2:49 pm

Post by Ythan »

The top image is town and the bottom is mafia, with the players in each faction listed in the top left corner.
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Post Post #98 (ISO) » Sat Oct 24, 2020 3:34 pm

Post by Gamma Emerald »

It looks like ClarkBar and Egix weren’t mentioned by scum enough to make into the cloud. Why was that?
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Post Post #99 (ISO) » Sat Oct 24, 2020 3:41 pm

Post by Cabd »

But like, Cabd, what if you told it to compare the same player in different games of each alignment?

Well, here's Morph the cat in two Micro games. One town, one mafia....
Spoiler: Mafia in Micro 231
Image

Spoiler: Town in Micro 719
Image


Does this data make you feel like you can solve morph's alignment in a third game with a very high rate of success?
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